Ten years on: art world is still in search of its virtual reality Eden

When, on 25 March 2014, Facebook (now Meta) acquired Oculus VR, then the leading company in immersive virtual reality (VR) technology, hopes were high. As the acquisition was announced (for “approximately $2bn”—it later emerged that it was closer to $3bn), Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, spoke about “getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow” and how Oculus might “change the way we work, play and communicate”.

It is fair to say that, in the art community as well as the wider world, that transformation has yet to arrive, at least as fully as Zuckerberg and others anticipated. VR headsets, including Meta’s latest, the Quest 3, are not uncommon in exhibitions and galleries, and artists are commissioned widely to make VR work; it is unquestionably one medium in the art ecosystem. But its impacts have hardly proved seismic.

Neatly, the 10th anniversary of the Oculus acquisition coincides with the release in the US of Apple’s Vision Pro, which the company refers to as its “first spatial computer”—a mixed reality (MR) headset that “seamlessly blends digital content with the physical world”. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, described its release as marking “a new era for computing”, on a par with the first Mac and the iPhone. So, where are we with virtual reality’s impact on art? Might the Vision Pro propel it into new realms?

An active VR subculture

As Michael Connor, the co-executive director of Rhizome—the centre for “born-digital” art and culture affiliated with New York’s New Museum—says, from the outset there were “multiple stories” about VR and its potential. “Artists’ role in ushering us from that point to this one has been—for all of the nuances and complexities of this form—trying to understand what it can do that’s specific and new, and working within that space. VR in the home hasn’t become widespread, but there is an active subculture of people that use it. And artists have been doing really interesting experimentation in that space that would not be possible in other forms. If the breadth of the medium hasn’t come to pass in the way some people hoped, certainly the depth of it has evolved in pretty much the way people that were advocating for it would have wanted.”

Connor’s colleague at Rhizome, the curator Xinran Yuan, suggests that there are “two major goals” for artists seeking out VR. “One is artistic innovation. And VR as an artistic tool is incredibly powerful, and allows artists to create what [the artists] Ilya and Emilia Kabakov talk about as the ‘total installation’.” The second, she says, is “expanding audience and dreaming for that one day where anyone can experience your artwork in an authentic way, anywhere, without having to travel to a single museum”.

The second might be some way off, but she suggests the first “has been accessible by an elitist group of artists for a while”. Indeed, Yuan worked with both HTC—whose Vive headsets have rivalled Oculus/Meta’s in terms of art-world adoption—and Meta itself in collaborating with artists and institutions. She hopes that with the arrival of the Vision Pro, “more artists can have more easy-to-use tools, so they don’t have to always rely on a group of technicians or a studio to collaborate with them”.

A less mediated engagement with the tech might create space for more critique. “Artists actively using the technology is in itself always a critique of the mainstream use—mostly by pro-gamers and for quite commercial, corporate use. But the efficacy of that critique won’t really surface until there’s more adoption by artists, when artists can actually get their hands on the technology,” Yuan says.

But the Vision Pro retails at $3,500. And crucially, in terms of its development as a tool for art, it has not been available for artists to use in its development phase. This has been vital at other moments in VR’s history. Shezad Dawood, who has made works that fuse “knowledge systems and experiential affect together in quite radical ways”, a process he has called “imagineering”, over three decades, is one of VR’s longest-term users.

Through a “maverick coder” friend, Dawood was able to get his hands on a prototype for the Vive in 2013, three years before it reached the “prosumer” market. Kalimpong (2016), his first VR work, is now in the Guggenheim collection. Its structure was based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, allowing him to explore “ideas such as embodiment and disembodiment and even where technology and spirituality might meet”. In his 2020 VR piece The Terrarium, meanwhile, “the audience becomes a sort of post-human marine hybrid that’s based on a digital sculpture I’d made previously”, Dawood says. Placing the audience in “a larger kind of constellation of thinking that already gives a richness before you come to the VR” gives the technological element “more of a sense of a play on that edge of embodiment”, he adds.

He has taken this to new heights in Night in the Garden of Love, a project for Wiels in Brussels that is now at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto (until 5 May). There is a key innovation with this work. “For the first time, it’s a two-player experience,” Dawood explains. Beginning in “a dystopian Detroit”, it moves through a recycling complex where a “hybrid human-plant character” leads the two players to “a transcendental garden of love”. The two-player function “allows two players to actually be aware of each other and see each other”.

The social promise

This tendency to find social uses for the technology is where virtual experiences are arguably most productive. Artists like Hito Steyerl and Jakob Kudsk Steensen have created hugely powerful augmented reality (AR) pieces on the relatively humble—and certainly less cumbersome—technology of a smartphone. And this might hint at how the Vision Pro’s MR experience might be used by artists when they grapple with it.

As Connor says, “a lot of people have responded to aspects of AR that are more of a social layer to the world as opposed to immersive art”. This relationship is, he says, “probably a little bit confused by the release of the Vision Pro because now the prompt is that AR is going to be also for a different technological environment”. Yuan says that while she has not tried the Vision Pro, she has noted commentary on “how vividly the reality layer is incorporated”. She adds: “I am actually very excited to see what incredible artworks can be created using the newer, better headset—not in a hyped way, but this has always been part of the imagination of what this can do. And now maybe it can finally do that.”

Oliver Miro, through his company Vortic, has attempted to create 3D exhibitions across online spaces, including in VR. A director of sales at Victoria Miro gallery, he is often to be found using headsets in the private space on stands at art fairs, offering collectors a more authentic experience of what objects would look like in an exhibition space or domestic room. And in using the Meta Quest 3, Vortic has embraced mixed reality, as was evidenced in Leda and the Swan, a Victoria Miro/Vortic collaboration last year, curated by Minna Moore Ede. “Minna had worked at the National Gallery for many years and had these amazing works that she wanted to reference in this exhibition. So you would walk around the contemporary works, then you put the headset on and you’d see in mixed reality the historical works,” Miro says. Accompanied by Moore Ede’s commentary, this was “an amazing use case” for the medium, he says.

On the Vision Pro, he says, “we’ve been waiting for a piece of hardware which supports the quality of the software”, and while the Quest 3 “has made inroads into that”, its computing power is lacking. The Vision Pro “is the first real headset that feels like it can give us the quality that we’ve been hoping for”. But despite his overall excitement, the peculiarities of the Vision Pro launch, with little collaboration between Apple and independent developers, mean that its effects are unlikely to be seen on Vortic’s activities—or anywhere else—for some time. It was “a ridiculous way to launch”, Miro says. “We would have loved to have been working on that for the last year. We were ready.” Vortic’s technical team is now grappling with the Vision Pro’s new challenges, among them surprising problems with sickness when watching video and attempting to move, Miro says.

As a seasoned VR user, Dawood will approach the Vision Pro as he does all tools and media. “My base position hasn’t changed; I’m incredibly wary of all of it,” he says. Through scepticism, he says, you can “take your creative ideas, some of the newer questions you want to put to the technology, and then actually start to play with it and see where it leads”. He is hoping the “reciprocal embodiment” that he explored in Night in the Garden of Love can be developed into something “more like a collective, communal experience”. The Vision Pro might well enable that. But it might take a while to find out.